I attended a terrific presentation during PPWC 2016, entitled A Novel in 90 Days by Johnny Worthen. Excellent presentation. In this Johnny combined (albeit perhaps not entirely knowingly) industrial-grade project management concepts with cognitive theory to model writing as a sustainable occupation. What I noted here was a great many parallels with software projects. For instance: Tracking Progress: Johnny wants …
This one has plagued me for awhile. I wonder if any agents have thrown out my queries just because of it. Thunderbird, it turns out, has a horrible formatting engine. And Microsoft Word pastes with a boatload of extra junk that Thunderbird doesn’t do so well with. At PPWC, one of the faculty actually recommended …
Today proved an eventful day. The only exciting thing I expected today was a job offer. I got more than I bargained for. I went on a group hike today, to Seven Bridges and beyond into Jones Park. The trail had a little ice here and there and eventually I donned my Micro-Spikes. To my …
I recently watched a terrific video on learning, especially as it applies to new technical skills: Making Badass Developers – Kathy Sierra. In this video, Kathy discusses that you have various skills, and they are each at certain levels–essentially 3 levels (roughly unacquired, in-process, and mastered). And what causes many of us stress when you are …
Found an interesting crash in VS2015. I reported it on the MSDN forums. Essentially, devenv.exe itself actually instantiates WCF singletons in your solution. It does so even if they aren’t being hosted by your startup project(s), in fact even if they are in projects not even referenced by your startup projects. And, if devenv.exe’s constructing of …
Here’s a book I meant to read last year, but didn’t get to until this year: SOA Patterns. Last year I attended an evening presentation by IDesign architect Petar Vucetin. At the end of the insightful session, he cited the SOA Patterns book. I knew that a recommendation from an IDesign architect is not wisely ignored, so I …
How many of you software geeks have been through a corporate Agile transformation? Did it at first seem as though everything was going to get dramatically better? As though you’d be unleashed to really do your work, and that no longer would useless processes hold you back? How did it turn out? Did the organization …
To most of you this will be minutiae, but we have two cats. Gremlin is an 18-year-old tuxedo, runt of her litter, with a pug nose. Timmy is a Siamese, 16 years old, and quite vocal. Timmy whines in the cold weather, hoping we will make it warm and let him out. He whines to …
For those into WCF, Juval Löwy’s 4th edition of Programming WCF Services is out, including coverage of the Azure Service Fabric. To those of us who have taken classes with IDesign, this is an important book that helps make a challenging yet powerful framework approachable. Many teams realize all too late that some of the infrastructure features …
Selective eating is not the same as picky eating. Have a read through this article if you don’t know what I’m talking about (thanks to my friend Kathy for sharing that). My son Cade has a variety of special needs including autism and ADHD. Lesser-known to many is that autism very often comes with eating and digestive …